The coming year promises to bring global Shakespeare mania, as the 400th anniversary of his death prompts a cavalcade of performances and exhibitions around the world.

In advance of that deluge, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are offering a more unusual view of the playwright’s early celebrity: a meticulous online re-creation of the long-vanished, and wildly popular, first museum dedicated to Shakespeare.

The three-room Shakespeare Gallery, opened by the publisher John Boydell in 1789 on the fashionable Pall Mall in London, closed in 1805. In its day, it was a sensation, attracting emotional crowds who came to gawk at enormous canvases depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies and history plays, commissioned from Britain’s leading painters and hung cheek by jowl on the pale blue walls.

“It was the Georgian equivalent of binge-watching Shakespeare,” said Janine Barchas, an English professor who led the project.

The digital re-creation — the first detailed visualization of the gallery, scholars say — gives a glimpse of a high-water moment of Bardolatry, not long after the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon that had helped cement the playwright as a defining national figure.

The re-creation also captures a crucial moment in the birth of modern museum culture, with its democratic appeals to the culture-hungry middle class.

“Today, museums live or die by their ability to engage the public,” said Rosie Dias, an art historian at the University of Warwick and the author of “Exhibiting Englishness,” a recent book about the Shakespeare Gallery. “That’s something you can really trace back to Boydell.”

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Janine Barchas, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who led the project.CreditMarsha Miller

The project, which went live on Wednesday, grew out of an earlier digital project of Ms. Barchas’s, “What Jane Saw,” which reproduced an 1813 London exhibition of portraits by Joshua Reynolds as it had appeared on the day when Jane Austen visited, looking for a likeness of “Mrs. D.” — Mrs. Darcy — as she cheekily put it in a letter.

The Reynolds exhibition, the first commemorative museum show dedicated to a single artist, attracted hundreds of people a day to gawk at the Annie Leibovitz-like array of royalty, society figures and theatrical stars on the walls.

But during her research, Ms. Barchas — who is also a curator of the exhibition “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” opening at the Folger Shakespeare Library in August — realized that the building that housed the Reynolds show had earlier been home to Boydell’s perhaps even more influential exhibition.

“It was an amazing coincidence,” she said.

While Ms. Barchas had already recreated the gallery space of the building (now demolished) for the Austen exhibition, figuring out exactly how Boydell had filled it was a challenge. More than half of the 86 works in the gallery in 1796, the year chosen for the reconstruction, had been lost. While a surviving watercolor of the gallery gave its general look, and engravings provided reduced black-and-white copies of the artworks, a catalog for the show did not indicate the size or wall location of the paintings.

To figure out the sizes of the missing paintings, Ms. Barchas created a rough algorithm based on a handwritten list of fees paid to the painters, which showed, unsurprisingly, that more famous artists like Reynolds and George Romney earned more per square inch than lesser lights.

Later, she located fragments of several huge paintings that had been cut down to drawing-room-friendly size, and imposed them on the engravings to calculate the size of the original canvas. Her estimates, she noted with satisfaction, were off “by only a few inches.”

The gallery was part of Boydell’s larger entrepreneurial effort to promote a distinctly English school of art to middle-class consumers. The real economic engine wasn’t the admission fee of one shilling, but the high-quality engravings by Boydell that were sold in the museum’s shop and by subscription.

Building a museum to sell prints “seems like a very modern, Met gift shop thing to do,” Ms. Barchas said. But she and other scholars point out that Boydell, who also marketed an authoritative edition of Shakespeare’s plays, was promoting lofty notions of Englishness as much as he was pushing his own wares.

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An image of a Shakespeare Gallery lottery ticket.CreditFolger Shakespeare Library

“It was a deeply nationalist project,” said Thora Brylowe, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who is writing about Boydell. He “was really saying that by buying an engraving or an edition, you were demonstrating your patriotism.”

When the gallery opened, The Times of London praised it as “the first stone of an English school of painting,” predicting that Boydell’s name would endure “in the same rank with the Medici.”

But not everyone was happy. Some sneered at the enterprise’s commercialism, while the writer Charles Lamb lamented that the painters’ images of Juliet or Lear would “confine the illimitable” and supplant “my and everybody’s Shakespeare.”

“Basically, he was saying the book was better than the movie,” Ms. Brylowe said.

Other visitors were put off by the sometimes floridly emotional behavior of the crowd. In a 1792 diary entry, the novelist Frances Burney noted her companions’ indignation at the antics of an apparent madwoman who wandered the gallery, clutching a nosegay and mumbling. On closer inspection, she turned out to be the actress Mary Wells, who was famous for making public scenes (and may, Ms. Barchas speculates, have been on Boydell’s payroll).

Wells “was certainly only performing vagaries” with the “burlesque humor of a bold player,” Burney wrote, adding with amusement that her companions’ reaction would itself “have been food for a painter.”

Boydell, who claimed to have invested an astronomical 150,000 pounds in the project, had intended to leave the gallery as a gift to the nation. But after the international market for prints crashed with the Napoleonic wars, the enterprise collapsed under his substantial debts.

The collection was the prize in an 1805 lottery held to clear those debts. The winner auctioned off the canvases at rock-bottom prices, and most disappeared.

It remains to be seen if the digital resurrection will have the same appeal to the Shakespeare-mad public in 2015 as it did in 1796. But Ms. Barchas said she was gratified by an emailed reaction she got from Ms. Brylowe, who wrote simply: “Dude. I am literally weeping.”

Ms. Barchas said, “That sets a new standard for success in a scholarly project.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: A 1796 Shakespeare Exhibition Has Become Virtual Reality. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe